Katrina’s Hidden Race War
Allow me for a second to break with all basic journalistic convention and bring up Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans, which of course is far more than what was done during the entire Presidential election.
One entirely predictable outcome of Katrina was the extent to which the conservative noise machine (like right wing radio and Fox Noise) hyped nearly non-stop “reported” incidents of looting, broken down along racial lines of course, to “prove” that folks of color will resort back to their core animal instincts in a time of danger and panic.
Not only it totally offensive, racist, and inaccurate, but now an astonishing article by A.C. Thompson of the The Nation highlights in staggering detail that in at least one case, the exact opposite was true— whites formed gangs (no other word for it), gangs and shot African-Americans in the aftermath of the storm, to “protect their area.”
The way Donnell Herrington tells it, there was no warning. One second he was trudging through the heat. The next he was lying prostrate on the pavement, his life spilling out of a hole in his throat, his body racked with pain, his vision blurred and distorted.
It was September 1, 2005, some three days after Hurricane Katrina crashed into New Orleans, and somebody had just blasted Herrington, who is African-American, with a shotgun. “I just hit the ground. I didn’t even know what happened,” recalls Herrington, a burly 32-year-old with a soft drawl.
The sudden eruption of gunfire horrified Herrington’s companions—his cousin Marcel Alexander, then 17, and friend Chris Collins, then 18, who are also black. “I looked at Donnell and he had this big old hole in his neck,” Alexander recalls. “I tried to help him up, and they started shooting again.” Herrington says he was staggering to his feet when a second shotgun blast struck him from behind; the spray of lead pellets also caught Collins and Alexander. The buckshot peppered Alexander’s back, arm and buttocks
[....]
Herrington, Collins and Alexander’s experience fits into a broader pattern of violence in which, evidence indicates, at least eleven people were shot. In each case the targets were African-American men, while the shooters, it appears, were all white.
The new information should reframe our understanding of the catastrophe. Immediately after the storm, the media portrayed African-Americans as looters and thugs—Mayor Ray Nagin, for example, told Oprah Winfrey that “hundreds of gang members” were marauding through the Superdome. Now it’s clear that some of the most serious crimes committed during that time were the work of gun-toting white males.
So far, their crimes have gone unpunished. No one was ever arrested for shooting Herrington, Alexander and Collins—in fact, there was never an investigation. I found this story repeated over and over during my days in New Orleans. As a reporter who has spent more than a decade covering crime, I was startled to meet so many people with so much detailed information about potentially serious offenses, none of whom had ever been interviewed by police detectives.
The gangs were from Algiers Point, a middle to upper middle class white enclave in the middle of the city, surrounded by lower income areas on all sides. The residents stockpiled guns and ammunition after the storm, fearing that African-Americans would flock to their area, which was relatively unharmed by the storm. They assembled a small group of white males with instructions to shoot anything that moved.
The hysteria created by the lurid details of chaos and gang activity led to paranoia and the “frontier justice” that ensued. Their are people to be blamed for this, and not nearly all of them lived in Algiers Point.
This is the nation we live in folks. And if A.C. Thompson had not done his job as a journalist, we of course would have never even heard about it.
